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June 26, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
43:16
Episode 118 - The “Fake” Racist Story, Analogies, Strzok and Immigrant Kids Without Phones
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Here we are.
It's the beginning of another great day.
A sunny summer day.
It's the best day for, you know what?
Coffee with Scott Adams.
Coming to you in the big mug.
Is this mug as large as my head?
Well, according to this perspective, it is.
Do you know when they used to say that pictures don't lie?
No. Pictures lie.
Pictures lie like a mofo.
But they don't lie about this, that it's time for the simultaneous sip.
Join me. Oh, that's good simultaneous sippin'.
Some of the best.
So, let's talk about a number of things that are on my Twitter feed today.
I'm going to read you a quote from Norm MacDonald.
You know Norm MacDonald?
I believe he leans conservative at the moment.
He's a comedian. And he says this in his Twitter feed.
The idiot sees the world as good versus evil.
The cynic sees the world as evil versus evil.
The truth that no one seems to be able to see is that the world is, and always has been, a battle of good versus good.
Wow! This is actually really profound.
You have to sort of spend some time looking at it and thinking about it.
This is the situation we find ourselves in.
There are not two sides in which one is good and one is evil.
There are two sides in which one feels that it is good and it believes, incorrectly, that the other one is evil.
But both sides are pretty sure that their version of the world is the good one.
It's a competition between two goods For priority, I guess.
So, I love that.
I like starting with that because it's kind of optimistic.
Next story is, I tweeted a story from CNN. Now, of course, I know what you're going to say.
Fake news? And you're going to wonder if the facts of this story are true.
But I think that they are.
The reason I think that they are true is because they agree with my preconceived notions.
So when I first heard the story about families being separated at the border, part of that story was, oh, but they have telephones.
You know, they have the right to call their parents twice a day.
And I said to myself, I don't think that's true.
It might be true that they have telephones and it might be true that some of them can connect with a parent and a child while in detention.
But I was very skeptical that most of the time a parent and a child could connect even once a day.
To me that seemed highly unlikely even if physically there are phones in all the places.
So, as I had suggested early on in this debacle, that although it's not a solution to the problem, it would certainly make people a lot more comfortable if they could have some kind of a video connection with their kid, no matter how briefly, at least once a day, just to make sure that they know what the kid's environment is, make sure the kid is alive and hasn't gone anywhere strange.
And so there certainly is a technological, you know, maybe a band-aid that could help a little bit.
But I'm going to call myself successful in predicting that our government exaggerated the ability for these families to talk to each other in detention.
Now I know what you're going to say.
Nobody asked them to break the law.
Nobody asked them to come into this country illegally and that's true.
My complaint is that our government lied to us, essentially, by suggesting that these people could make contact with each other and I don't think that was ever the case.
So, not that we have an obligation to make things super comfortable for people who are breaking the laws of the United States, but this might be something where putting a little money toward that cause would just make everybody feel like they're better people.
Or, as I like to say it, quoting Norm MacDonald, sometimes it's a competition of good versus good.
And maybe everybody's on the side of these parents and kids being able to at least communicate.
So I think that should be part of any long-term solution.
It's hard to do anything in the short term.
Now, you may have seen a story that I tweeted around yesterday from the New York Daily News.
Yes, I know what you're going to say.
It might be fake news because it came from the New York Daily News.
But it was a viral video of some older woman with gray hair and a green top in which she's getting in the face of someone who appears to be a Mexican national working in this country.
Don't know his legal or illegal status.
It wasn't relevant to the story.
But the woman is giving him the finger to his face and saying how bad he is because he's Mexican and she hates him, etc.
Now, I tweeted around with My tweet just said, don't be this lady.
In other words, she was a bad example of a human being.
Forget about being a bad example of a Trump supporter.
She was a bad example of a human being.
The person whose face she was getting into, the presumed Mexican national who may or may not also be an American citizen, who knows?
That part wasn't stated in the story.
But that guy, I like.
Because the way he handled this situation was extraordinarily graceful.
Now, of course, he also didn't want to get, you know, in trouble.
So, you know, there's self-interest involved.
But the amount of restraint that this guy showed was impressive.
Now, when I tweeted this around, here's the good part of the story.
I think perhaps a majority of people who responded to the tweet, probably more than half, said they believed the story was fake and that it was staged.
And people are starting to ask, Where is the name of this person who allegedly did this on this alleged real video?
Why don't we know that person's name?
It's a good question.
Because typically with these stories you find out who it was pretty quickly.
I'm not willing to believe this is fake.
I also don't rule it out.
I would say there's no way to know.
My reading of it, she looked real but crazy.
Now, here's the positive.
You know, I always like to look at the positive.
Let me give you the positive.
I've got a Nazi on here.
Alright, get rid of Nazi.
Goodbye. Here's the part that I think is good news.
It's good news in this bad situation.
The good news is that nobody I saw who responded to this who was a Trump supporter believed that this person could even be real.
Yeah, there may be a few, but by far the vast majority of people who saw it said to themselves what I said to myself.
I've never met a person like that.
I don't know anybody who's a Trump supporter who would support that woman, or even her views if they were just even silent in her head.
I've never seen that.
Now, if you were on the anti-Trump side and you saw that video, wasn't the first thing you imagined they thought?
I don't want to be a mind reader, but I'm speculating here.
I imagine the first thing that people thought when they saw that video, if they were anti-Trumpers, they probably said, ah, that's what they all think.
That's a good example of a widespread opinion.
Imagine living in that movie that you would imagine that Trump supporters would support her.
I'm getting to the best part.
Are you ready for the best part?
I tweeted this picture of a hater, a racist, doing a racist thing to a human being who looked like kind of an awesome guy.
And what did all Trump supporters who read it say?
What did 100% of the people in my Twitter feed say when they saw this?
They rejected it.
They strongly rejected the woman in the video.
In other words, wait for it, Wait for it.
The best part's coming right next.
Here it is. Republicans policed their own.
Right? So this example of bad behavior was surfaced.
Might be real, might be fake, but it actually doesn't matter for my point.
100% of Trump supporters, in my Twitter feed anyway...
Publicly rejected her.
She was essentially caked out of the club.
Do you see that happening with other groups?
Sometimes, but not enough, right?
This was immediate, unambiguous rejection.
You're not in the club anymore.
Whatever club we're in, you're not in that club.
Get out of here. Yeah, you're voted off the island, exactly.
You don't see that with a lot of different groups.
So if you're on the anti-Trump side, look at this.
Don't look at just the video of the woman who's a racist.
You should look at that also. But look at the reaction from Trump supporters, Republicans, conservatives.
100% rejection.
Publicly and immediately.
Complete rejection.
Is that what you expected?
Anti-Trumpers?
There are always a few anti-Trumpers on my feed.
Is that what you expected?
Did you expect that 100% of Trump supporters would side against the American citizen, presumably, In favor of a guy who may or may not be here legally, but is a nice guy and not the racist in this story.
You didn't expect that, did you?
I expected it.
Do you know why I retweeted this?
This is why.
Because I expected this.
I expected Republicans would kick her off the island.
And they did. Alright, so that's me with all kinds of good news today.
Let's go to the next story.
So, Tom Steyer, you all know Tom Steyer.
He was running those ads on CNN for a long time.
About, let's impeach the president.
Have you seen any of those Tom Steyer advertisements on CNN lately?
Saying we should impeach the president?
Used to be a lot of them, right?
Almost every time you turned on the TV, there was Tom Steyer impeached the president.
Did those advertisements kind of just quietly go away?
And was it about the time that the economy was hitting its peak and North Korea was starting to play friendly?
It got a little bit dumb, but apparently he's saying it on, at least in speeches, and he actually said recently that if Democrats, the only way Democrats can do well in the midterm is that they should, you know, the candidates should promise to impeach Trump.
Now, what would happen if In a country where you've got a legally elected president who the deep state, or at least FBI agents in particular, had clearly tried to depose, and the economy is screaming, jobs are great, and all the big metrics are doing well.
Imagine if that president gets impeached.
Yeah, so it's ugly, right?
That's ugly. Now imagine if this president stays in for another several years.
What will you get? Well, you'll get capable judges that may or may not agree with you, your preferences.
You'll probably get a strong economy.
You'll probably get safety from ISIS and terrorists.
You'll probably get safer with North Korea, you might get some better trade deals after some friction.
We're in the friction stage right now, but that's what negotiations are.
Negotiations are friction.
We're in that stage.
So, I would suggest that...
And by the way, you saw that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer immediately distanced themselves from not only Maxine Waters...
But from the idea of making impeachment your top priority.
So even the leaders of the Democrat Party distanced themselves from both impeachment and the Maxine Waters idea of harassing Trump supporters in public.
I think because they understand Pelosi and Schumer, because whether you love them or hate them, the one thing we'll all agree is they really know their politics, right?
They've done this for a while, and they can see that these are losing propositions.
But it's worse than that.
If your goal is impeachment, It's not just removing a leader in this particular case.
If you're removing an incompetent leader, or somebody who really needed to get removed, I think you could get most of the country on board.
But if you're removing a leader who's doing exactly what the people who voted for him wanted him to do, you are...
Wait for it.
Wait for it.
You're voting to...
To destabilize the government.
To destabilize the government.
Now, is that a risk that you would ever take when things are going well?
Now, if things were going poorly and everything was just going to hell, well, you take a little more chance then.
When do you take risks?
Let me ask you.
The people who follow this periscope, I think it's fair to say, you can fact check me on this, but it's fair to say that you're all unusually smart and inexplicably sexy.
I think that passes the fact check.
So those of you who are unusually smart and inexplicably sexy, which doesn't really matter in this case, Answer this question for me, that apparently most of the country will get wrong.
But I trust you, because you're unusually smart, inexplicably sexy, to get this right.
When is a good time to take a risk?
Is a good time to take a risk that you'll break the system, like permanently break it, when things are going well?
Is that when you break it?
Or do you introduce risk when everything's going to hell anyway?
And that's the time that you need to introduce some risk because otherwise you're doomed anyway.
Now, the trade wars are the kind of risk that it's very unlikely is going to unwind the country.
So that's exactly the right kind of risk at the right time, because you're going to see, oh, the stock market goes down 300 or 400 points until we get a deal.
But since all of the countries have a top incentive, really sort of a number one incentive right after security is the economy, All the players involved in the trade negotiations want a good outcome.
It might be 10 or 20 percent better or worse than they wanted, but they're all going to eventually settle for something.
So that's a reasonable time to take a risk.
Our economy is high.
You can take a little friction because there's no calamitous risk, really, with trade negotiation.
But if you're looking to remove A legally elected president who is performing extraordinarily well for the people who elected him.
I realize that's a difference of opinion, but the people who elected him are very happy.
One of the most popular presidents within his base of all time, at the moment, right now.
That wasn't true in the beginning, but at the moment he's one of the most popular presidents If you remove that president with impeachment on BS reasons, after we've already learned that the FBI was trying to do it in devious ways, that's destabilizing.
That's destabilizing in a serious way.
And do you take that kind of risk when things are going well with the economy?
It's just a bad risk management thing to do.
So if Democrats want to make impeachment their rallying cry, You need to get to the polls.
You really need to get to the polls because that would destabilize the entire country in a way that very few things would.
Now here's another thing that we keep seeing where people starting to talk about that the vitriol is reaching such a high level that it's going to turn into more physical violence.
And what happens if civil war breaks out?
One of the things you may have noticed is that Republicans, although they like to talk about toughness, etc., Republicans have been very disinclined to act physically aggressive, outside of weird situations like a rally where everybody gets worked up, but that's mostly just talk.
But in the real world, Republicans are very reserved, and let me tell you why.
Because in a revolution, it's only going to go one way.
So I think that the people who own the guns, Republicans, are very controlled about this and are not even a little bit thinking about, I've got to get my gun out of the gun safe.
I don't think anybody's thinking that.
Because they know...
There's not really going to be a physical civil war.
So let me give you a prediction that I feel more confident about than anything I've ever said.
There will not be a physical civil war in this country.
Because the side that doesn't want that also has all the guns.
So, you know, they're not going to be shooting unarmed people wearing pink hats.
It's just not going to happen. And I guess you could argue that the good news is there's such a power imbalance.
If the left and the right were somehow about equally armed, that might be dangerous, but they're not.
They're so unequally armed that the people with the weapons are not even going to bother to use them, because there's nothing to fight against.
There's no real risk.
If the shots are fired, just let the police handle it.
Just step away. If you're a Republican with a gun, run away from the gunshots if the stuff goes down.
Let the police handle it.
So I don't think that's a big risk.
One of the fascinating things about what we're seeing with the unpleasantness that citizens are hurling at each other at the moment is I'm seeing, and this is just mind-boggling to me, I'm seeing on CNN, Don Lemon Show, for example, that there's a suggestion that the reason that the left...
Is acting so aggressively, let's say unkind, is that they're getting it from the president and that he's setting the tone and that that tone is influencing them to be bad people.
Now, does it make sense to you that the people who dislike the president the most Have decided to imitate him on the very thing that they hate the most?
What is the one thing they hate the most about the president?
It's sort of his vibe, the way he acts, the way he's divisive, the fact that he'll attack people, his rhetoric, right?
Those are all the bullying.
Those are all the things they hate the most, right?
So what have they decided to copy?
They've decided to copy the only part they don't like.
And they're blaming him for that decision?
It seems to me that copying the only thing they don't like is not a winning proposition.
And by the way, they're not doing it right.
Because if you watch the way the president uses his attitude in attacking ways, he attacks other countries.
In polite ways usually, but he attacks other countries.
Sometimes you have to send a Tomahawk missile.
So he's attacking other countries and he's attacking his critics.
People who are specifically attacking him.
What is the left doing?
They're attacking other citizens.
They're attacking people who are just trying to feed their family and have a different opinion.
There's no correlation between those two things.
If they were actually being influenced by the president, they would be angry at other countries for whatever other countries are doing, whether it's immigration or trade or anything else.
If they were imitating the president, they would be going after their critics who would attack them first, And other countries when it's in the U.S. interest to push back.
So if the left is bad at knowing how to copy Trump, I'm not sure that's his problem.
Changing subjects again, I get in continuous debates about the value of analogies.
And somebody forwarded a bit from a book that, I wish I knew where it came from, but it's a great backing up of my point that analogies, we think analogies are a form of thinking, but they're kind of the opposite.
An analogy is just something that reminded you of another situation.
It doesn't inform you about anything.
It doesn't tell you what to do next.
It doesn't do anything.
We just imagine it does.
Oh, I'm going to talk about Space Force in a minute.
So remind me if I forget.
Space Force. Alright, so let me read this description of an analogy from some book.
I wish I knew what it was from.
An analogy is a comparison between two essentially unlike things for the purpose of definition or illustration.
In arguing by analogy, a writer draws a likeness between things on the basis of a single shared feature and then extends the likeness to other features.
But analogy can only illustrate a point.
That's what I say. Analogies are good for illustrating a point.
Never prove it.
They illustrate points.
That's what I say. They never prove it.
That's the other thing I say.
It can trick one into assuming, trick one into assuming, that because things are similar in one respect, they must be alike in other respects.
And then he gives an example of a false analogy, You don't need the example.
But I wanted you to know I'm not the one person in the world who believes that analogies are not useful in arguments.
An analogy is nothing more than something that reminded you of something else.
Yeah, I wish I could tell you what it was I was reading, but it came without a source.
It was just a Twitter thing.
Let's talk about Space Force.
So, one of the things...
That I especially like about this president is that if somebody leaves free money on the table and he sees it and he says, is this free money?
Does anybody want the free money?
Okay, alright, I'll take it.
I'll take the free money.
So if there's something that's available for free, he takes it.
Let me tell you how this fits Space Force.
True or not true, any of our last presidents could have created a Space Force.
Because really what a Space Force is at the moment, and even for the past 10 years, the Space Force was us planning to have a Space Force.
So really, it's not going to be funded like the other existing forces.
It will be funded as a research thing to figure out how we can get there, a test thing, and it might take 50 years to get there.
So our last presidents had the option of being, here's the good part, of being the president who started the Space Force.
Some president was going to be the one who will be known through history as the one who started Space Force.
Trump looked at the table and saw that free money sitting there and said, hey, if I don't start a Space Force, the next president will start a Space Force.
Because there's going to be a Space Force.
We don't know when, but there's going to be one.
So he just said, well, I'll just be that president.
That's mine now. Let's call it Space Force.
And for the rest of history, which could be thousands of years, the history books will say, President Trump, who started Space Force back in 2018.
So that's the part that's funny.
This was here for all the other presidents.
They could have started a Space Force.
There wasn't anything magic about 2018.
You could have done it for the last 10 years.
But they didn't. It was free money.
He saw it. They didn't.
That's just one of the things I like about him.
It's there for it to take you.
So he just took it.
Now I also love the fact...
That if you're talking about the military, generally people on the left are a bit anti-military anyway, or at least not as pro-military.
And people in, let's say, Silicon Valley and other technical jobs, they tend to lean left, I believe.
You could fact check me on that.
But they seem to lean left.
What is the one thing that people in tech jobs like more than just about anything else?
Well, maybe after sex and LSD, I suppose.
Microdosing. But one of the things they like best is science fiction.
Yeah, Star Trek, Star Wars.
If you asked me to list my ten favorite television shows, I believe six of them would involve something that looks like a Space Force.
I love my Space Forces when they're on TVs and movies and stuff.
And so you have this whole segment of society that the technology-related people who probably have an affinity more for, you know, high-tech sci-fi stuff.
And so Trump just fills in that block.
He's like, okay, I'll be the guy who started Space Force.
If you like the Federation, you're going to love me.
Yeah, The Expanse is my favorite TV show at the moment.
Actually, second favorite show.
My favorite show is The Five.
I just love that show.
I watch it as soon as it's done.
I watch it on DVR. But The Expanse would be number two.
Anyway, so I think it was clever of Trump to take that position.
Is there anything else I haven't?
Supreme Court just ruled on travel ban.
All right, I'll look into that.
Breaking, Connie got help from Tony Robbins.
Thank you.
My god, all the news is breaking while I'm on here too.
Yeah, let me tell you why I like the show called The Five.
The thing that they do write on the five is the combination of the five different personalities.
So when you're watching that show, you're not just catching up with the news, which it does very well.
You know, the top stories.
But you're enjoying the competing personalities, and they've done a really good job of making sure that those five people are completely different people.
Like, there's nobody on The Five who's like anybody else on The Five.
You know, except in some cases, some opinions.
But personality-wise, they're completely different.
Now, you think that's not a big deal?
You think that's not a big deal?
Look at CNN. Imagine Jake Tapper.
Okay? Now, can you imagine that everyone else who appears on CNN is a version of Jake Tapper?
There's bearded Jake Tapper, there's female Jake Tapper, there's black Jake Tapper, there's gay Jake Tapper, but they're all Jake Tapper.
Right? So you can watch CNN all day long and it's different people, you know, different genders, different ethnicities, different sexual orientations.
That part's great.
But they're all kind of still Jake Tapper, aren't they?
You go to watch The Five and they're just completely different people.
Which just makes it more interesting.
Um... Alright, so that's best show on TV in my opinion.
And by the way, I like Jake Tapper a lot.
As a person, he's great.
You can disagree with his positions on politics.
Travel ban. Well, okay, you're going to make me look at the travel ban.
We'll do this in real time.
Alright, let's see what we got going here.
Where would I look? CNN? Let's go to CNN first.
Don't see anything on a travel ban.
Oh, there it is. Supreme Court upholds Trump travel ban.
Okay, so I guess that's the whole story, right?
The headline is the story.
The Supreme Court upheld it.
I guess that's the whole story on that.
Look how the justices voted though.
How did the justices vote?
5-4 along partisan lines.
I'm not sure what I was supposed to get out of that.
What is Stormy doing?
Yeah, did Stormy just disappear as a topic?
Do you know why Stormy disappeared as a topic?
Can anybody tell me why did Stormy disappear?
I'll tell you why, but I want to see if you know.
Why did Stormy Daniels disappear as a topic?
Nobody knows?
Thank you.
Thank you.
No, Stormy disappeared as a topic because the audience got bored with it.
It was just all the same story.
So for ratings reasons, she became not the story.
The story didn't change.
It just became unimportant because the public was like, all right, we've heard this.
Can you give us fewer stories about lawyers and porn stars?
Yeah, the border story was just more red meat for the anti-Trumpers, so it did take away all of the attention.
Anything to say about the New York Times' crisis of democracy?
So the crisis of democracy thing is, without reading it, I'm sure it has to do with Trump being, you're hearing a lot the critics saying that Trump is acting like an authoritarian president.
Is that the word they're using? Authoritarian?
And when I look at the reality of that, I say, okay, if you see this authoritarian president Which of these things are consistent with that?
He obeys the courts.
Is that authoritarian?
He listens to public opinion, such as children being separated from their parents, and immediately responds to public opinion from his critics.
From his critics, now in this case, Republicans also were appalled by people being separated and wanted it to stop if it could.
Maybe just a difference in how long that would take or how aggressively we should do it.
But everybody was on the same side of that.
Anyway, then there's Trump cutting government regulations.
And not wanting the president to have as much power on that stuff.
Somebody says he wants to be an authoritarian but can't because of the existing bureaucracy.
Well, I would say that's true.
So somebody said that President Trump wants to be an authoritarian, but can't because of the bureaucracy and various checks and balances.
Do you know who else would like to be an authoritarian leader, but there are too many obstacles?
Do you know who else?
Do you know who else?
You, and you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and you.
Yeah, everybody would be an authoritarian leader of the universe if there were no obstacles.
Now, some people might say, I don't think I want that kind of responsibility.
I'd rather just be a subject in this empire.
But a lot of people, including me and most of the people watching this periscope, would say, well, if there were no obstacles to it, I think I'd like to be an authoritarian leader.
Yeah, so I'm not sure that that means anything to say that in his inner thoughts he would like to be an authoritarian leader.
Yeah, so would everybody.
We'd all love to be an authoritarian leader.
Let's stop pretending he's the one.
It's like, oh, I found the one guy who would be emperor of the universe if there were no obstacles to it.
But he doesn't live in that world, you don't live in that world, and it's just nothing I'm going to worry about.
Now, the other thing that the anti-Trumpers get wrong, and to me, this is the wrongest thing that they get, maybe.
Well, I don't know, it's a lot of competition for what's wrong.
But the thought that Republicans would support an authoritarian president is laughably wrong so wrong that it might be the wrongest thing they've ever thought because the entire vibe of the right is the constitution and the rule of law so if we had a leader who started violating the constitution or the rule of law do
you know what the right would say to the left You know, the left would be, oh, we've got to do something, revolution.
Our president has become an authoritarian leader.
If anything like that actually happened, the people with all the guns, the people on the right, the Trump supporters, would say in unison to the people on the left who don't have guns, you know what they would say?
Hold my Budweiser.
Yeah, just hold my Budweiser.
We got this. Because there's, you know, half of the country is armed to the teeth and will die to protect the Constitution.
They're the people who are protecting you from an authoritarian leader.
It's not the people in the pink hats.
The Pink Hats people just need to stay out of the way.
It's like, please, just stay out of the way.
We got this. I mean, it would take about five minutes for the right to take back the country.
Honestly, it would happen in an afternoon, I think.
Because the military wouldn't support it.
The military would just walk away.
Do you have an AK? No comment.
One of the things I would never do is give an inventory of my armory on a public forum.
Wouldn't that be the worst idea in the world?
Let me tell the public all of the firearms that I own and are hidden in my house in various protective places.
Yeah, I don't think that would be a good idea.
Let's just say I support the Second Amendment.
We'll leave it at that.
Just leave it at that.
Alright. I think we've covered everything now.
What's my gate code?
That's funny. Alright.
That's enough for today.
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